OK, so last week I posted the first deck of what I intend to be a 6(7?) part series where I build a shadows deck for each house. Greyjoy is going to be a biatch, but we’ll cross that road when we get there. For our first foray into shadows we had to travel way down south to the lands of the Dornish and House Martell. That deck had some great combos utilizing Martell’s icon control with The Black Cells, to lock down opponent’s characters, and Valar Dohaeris to effectively give yourself a one sided reset, much like what Targ has with The Hatching’s Feast and Threat from the North. I had some great feedback about the deck, and our own, Larry Legend, built the deck and took it out for a couple games. His feedback helped to hopefully improve upon the build(thanks again, Larry) and maybe even give him a spark of love for a house he doesn’t normally play. A little over a week ago our good friend, Robert, posted that he is looking for some ideas for a deck to play out of Lanny. He said he might revisit the Shadows mechanic, so I wanted to post up a deck I have been playing a little as of late to see if it could further spark his interest(or anybody’s for that matter) in Shadows. Let’s take a look at the deck, shall we?

Plot (7)
At the Gates (GotC) x1
City of Lies (CoS) x1
City of Sin (AToT) x1
City of Soldiers (TBoBB) x1
City of Spiders (TftRK) x1
Search and Detain (HtS) x1
Valar Morghulis (Core) x1

The focus of this deck is definitely on kneel. Kneel, kneel, kneel…a little more kneel, then finish with some Kneel. I won’t list all that tech in the deck, but let’s just say that Cersei Lannister is a beast of a card in this deck, and You Killed the Wrong Dwarf can be dual purpose…kneel the opponent’s character, or kneel your own when you are at 14 power for the sneaky win…dirty Lannisters! *shakes head*

So, I want to point out that the plot deck is basically unchanged from the Martell deck(after Larry’s tweaking). The only difference is that I am including Search and Detain over Valar Dohaeris. The City plots are great for a deck based on shadows as At the Gates is a fantastic opener and can fetch a character for you. Effectively making it a 5 or 6 gold plot in this deck. Maester Creylen or Maester Aemon are the go to guys here. Then, City of Lies is great for dropping in a couple shadows cards. Making it either a 5 or 7 gold plot. Both of these add to the shenanigans of the other great City plots in City of Soldiers, Spiders, and Sin(which are pretty much the only playable city plots…for now. ;-D). Finally Search and Detain is a staple plot and can help to either save an important character from Valar(Cersei or Tyrion), or to bounce expensive characters or locations in the hopes that they won’t be able to play them again before you can strip it from their hand in an INT challenge.

For this deck, I went ahead and did away with the City of Shadows agenda making this a little more straightforward in it’s focus. After building the deck, I actually did not have an agenda. Soooo, why not play The Maester’s Path? As, Robert, and, Steven, said in their Deck Building part 1 podcast, there really isn’t any reason not to run the agenda if you don’t already have one. It’s just such a great addition and a no-brainer. Not that I like that, but it’s completely true. However, there aren’t many Maesters in the deck… just 4, so we’re only going to run the 3 chains that would help the most in the Valyrian Steel, Tin, and Black Iron links. Getting access to Icon removal/granting, attachment hate, and card draw…nothing wrong with that!

The character base is fairly solid and has a fairly nice array of costs, strength, and icons. The one thing that Lanny lacks is military strength, so I have added a decent amount of MIL icon characters to ensure that you don’t get completely run over by Houses Stark, Baratheon, or Greyjoy…or Targ…or Martell….yeah Lanny is very bad at MIL strength(except for Clansmen of course. But clansmen suck, so who cares? lol.) As I noted above, Cersei, is a beast when you can win a challenge with her and have a couple cards in shadows(or more!). Then, I’ve included the always annoying Castellan of the Rock as my one restricted card. Most people would play Pyromancer’s Cache here, or even Narrow Escape, but I wanted the extra control and Castellan is one of the best in the game. Plus, I think with 3x Golden Tooth Mines, Tommen Baratheon, Valyrian Steel Link, and 2x King’s Landing, I should have plenty of card draw. The other all star character is the shadows Tyrion Lannister. He’s just so good, I can’t describe how much I hate my friend Jonathan for suggesting to FFG that they make Tyrion a 5star card when they were developing this set. What was he thinking? Oh, yeah, Tyrion is his favorite character. So that makes sense. Hey, at least I got my Dany from Gates of the Citadel that I begged for(and my Bilbo Baggins, but that’s another game entirely).

There is not much to say about the events… they kneel things and that’s what we do.

As always, if there are any thoughts or suggestions about the deck I would love to hear them. Especially from you, Robert. This week is for you!

I’m glad you liked the deck, Larry! It can be very disgusting at times when all the cards come together.

I do hate that one card can completely undo one House’s main theme, but, I guess that’s not unprecedented. Brienne(pots) hoses Martell cancel and challenge control, Stark Seige in general, and Greyjoy kill saves. So I guess YG neutering Lanny kneel isn’t all that bad.

Ben, why are you glad to hear that the deck is good? If anyone should be glad, it’s me. lol